There are a number of new articulated and animated toys capable of interacting with human users in a way which appears intelligent which are well known in the art and commercially available under such trademarks as Furby® from Tiger Electronics, Ltd., and Barney® from MicroSoft Inc. These toys are capable of understanding speech, speaking in a natural language and demonstrating limited animation such as mouth, eye and ear movements. In addition, prior to the development of these more sophisticated toys, which generally include an embedded microprocessor and computer-based algorithm, other predecessors such as that commonly known under the trademark Teddy Ruxpin™ from YES! Entertainment Corporation, are also capable of exhibiting semi-intelligent behavior through speech and animation. Teddy Ruxpin™, and other toys like it, utilize a tape mechanism to provide the sound and animation control. Without exception, to date, a toy has never been developed which is capable of recognizing the human user who is playing with the toy. The advantage of such capability is immediately obvious as it increases the sophistication and intelligence of a toy to levels heretofore unseen. A toy with the capability of recognizing its human user can learn specific information about said human user and interact individually with a number of said human users by providing tailored entertainment. In addition, toys capable of recognizing an individual human user could control access to the Internet through integrated web browser software and thus provide protection, especially for young children, from inappropriate web site content.
There exists many methods for creating the semblance of intelligence in a toy or computer game. Toys with animated moving parts are commonplace and anyone of ordinary skill in the art will be familiar with several methods to fabricate quasi-intelligent articulated toys. Similarly there exists many methods for the biometric identification of humans which includes face recognition, voice recognition, iris scanning, retina imaging as well as fingerprint verification.
Iris and retina identification systems are considered “invasive”, expensive and not practical for applications such as integrating with a toy where limited computer memory storage is available and manufacturing costs must be minimized. Voice recognition, which is not to be confused with speech recognition, is somewhat less invasive, however it is cost prohibitive and can require excessive memory storage space for the various voice “templates”. In addition, identification processing delays can be excessive and unacceptable for many applications.
Fingerprint verification is a minimally invasive way to identify a human user. A fingerprint verification and identification system can be constructed in such a way that its operation is simple and natural for a human user. With recent advances in the performance of inexpensive single board computers and embedded microprocessors, it has become possible to implement a practical and cost effective fingerprint verification system for use in providing human user recognition for toys or computer games.
Although many inventors have offered approaches to verifying human fingerprints for recognizing human users, none have succeeded in producing a system that would be viable for use in an articulated and animated toy or computer game. Part of the reason for this lies in the severe constraints imposed on the sensor apparatus such as size and physical configuration. Another reason is that the complexity of the algorithms and the hardware necessary to implement them makes such a recognition system cost prohibitive for use with a toy.
The present invention overcomes these limitations by combining streamlined algorithms with advanced microprocessor architectures. The algorithms of the present invention have been optimized to run quickly on small inexpensive single board computers and embedded microprocessors.